By Betzy Lynch in La Jolla, California
On Friday, I saw my friend Silvana in the Galleria at the JCC. As I moved toward her to greet her with a hug, she warned me that she was a little sweaty, she had just finished playing pickleball. I gave her a hug anyway.
I asked how the game went, and she laughed and said she honestly couldn’t remember. She had been so pleasantly distracted by all of the preschoolers, their parents and grandparents gathered nearby, singing together in the sukkah.
“It was just magical,” she said.
I have been thinking about her reaction throughout Shabbat and as we welcome Sukkot.
What struck me was that Silvana wasn’t part of the gathering. She wasn’t sitting in the sukkah or singing with the preschoolers. She was simply nearby, getting some exercise with friends, when something beautiful found its way into what she was doing and caused her to notice.
In some ways, that is exactly what Sukkot asks of us.
For one week, Jewish tradition asks us to step outside the solid walls and familiar routines of our lives and spend time in a temporary outdoor structure called a sukkah. We eat there, gather with family and friends, welcome guests and celebrate. The sukkah recalls the temporary shelters of the Israelites’ journey through the wilderness, but it also asks us to experience the world differently, to become a little less protected, a little less certain, and perhaps a little more open to what is around us.
Even the roof of the sukkah teaches us how to do that.
The s’chach, the branches and natural materials that form the roof, must provide more shade than sunlight, but ideally should not completely close us off from the sky. Through its openings, we should be able to see the stars.
The Kabbalists saw something profound in those openings.
They understood the s’chach as representing or makif, a Divine light that surrounds us but is too expansive for us to fully comprehend. We live within realities larger than our own understanding. The Ari, the great 16th-century Kabbalist Rabbi Isaac Luria, taught that through the openings in the s’chach, this higher light becomes visible below, like the stars we glimpse through the branches.
I love that image.
The opening is not where the shelter has failed. The opening is where something beyond the shelter can reach us.
So much of our lives is spent trying to close the openings. We want certainty. We want answers. We want to know what comes next.
And then Sukkot asks us to build differently.
Build a roof…but leave openings.
Create shelter…but don’t shut out the sky.
Sit in the shade…but leave enough space to see the stars.
Maybe those openings are also invitations.
An invitation to look up. To notice something we weren’t expecting. To encounter someone else’s joy, tradition, story or perspective and allow it, even briefly, to become part of our own.
Which brings me back to Silvana.
She came to the JCC to play pickleball, and through an opening in her morning, she was inspired by children, parents and grandparents singing together. She wasn’t looking for that experience. It simply reached her and she was open enough to receive it.
Perhaps that is part of what it means to create a community of belonging: not that everyone must be inside every “sukkah,” but that we create openings and invitations everywhere.
We don’t see the entire sky through the s’chach. We get glimpses, a point of light here, another there, reminding us that there is always something beyond what we can currently see.
This week, I hope you will accept one very literal invitation: come visit our sukkah at the JCC. Stop by anytime over the next week. Sit for a few minutes. Look up through the s’chach. Whether Sukkot is already part of your tradition or this is your first time stepping into a sukkah, there is a place for you beneath its shelter.
And while you’re there, look for the openings.
You might just see the stars.
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Betzy Lynch is the CEO of the Lawrence Family JCC.